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New Media, New Skills

"Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?"

At the crest of the wave, the pace of change is overwhelming and there is a great temptation (for some) to try to ride that wave and that can look very impressive... for a while. Slightly behind the wave, you begin to see the really effective approaches beginning to take hold and that is perhaps where you need to look to see long-term trends and truly useful approaches. One of these trends has been the popularity of VLEs and MLEs. You can read more about these in other documents on this site but essentially the drive is to integrate all computer based activity in Universities and so make it as easy to engage in e-learning as is to send an email. Making systems easy to use usually carries the penalty that they are limited in scope. For those starting out in e-learning, this will not matter, as the technology provided is likely to be more than you need. As you develop as an eTeacher, however, you will identify needs, perhaps ones very specific to you, that the system was not designed for. If you are not to let the technology determine your teaching rather than the other way around, you must learn to communicate your needs to the providers of the systems and they must learn to listen.

The tools and environments that are available to lecturers are still determined more by service issues than academic ones. Some enthusiastic individuals and departments are impatient with central provision and perhaps will always provide their own facilities but the majority will wait to see what central services provide. The advent of VLEs in recent years and the formation of eLab at Warwick have largely been in response to this need for easy and easily supported provision of core tools. It should go without saying that the tools will not teach for you but obviously they need to be in place. The main reason that the decisions have to date been made by central services is that there is that academics are still largely uninformed. Hopefully as they become users of the technologies they will provide more input into the design of these tools.

One thing that will almost certainly not happen is that good teachers will be replaced by automated systems or even, in my opinion, that face to face education can be entirely replaced but you can be sure that learning technology will find its way into your teaching.

Whatever sorts of technologies you decide to use, you will need to develop new skills and recognise that your students also need to develop new skills. There is much from your existing teaching practice that applies just as well in this new environment although sometimes those practices successful as they might be have been developed without conscious thought and need to be teased out and analysed before you can apply them in a new context. One of the biggest benefits of using learning technology is that it forces us to do this and this can enhance all of your teaching. Primarily, it is less easy to think and adapt on the fly than it is in a traditional face-to-face environment.

More about developing staff skills